The VA Model

Responding to a fellow doctor's criticism of the Veterans' Affairs (VA)Department health care on ModernHealthcare.com, Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, former under secretary for health for the VA, cites a book by Phillip Longman, Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours. The book describes a dramatic transformation in healthcare practices that took place at the agency, beginning in 1995. Dr. Garthwaite points out that "the clinical information technology platform for the VA is consistently lauded as among the best for delivering comprehensive patient care."

Physician-Computer Connection Symposium Address Health Disparities

At the 18th annual Physician-Computer Connection Symposium in Ojai, Calif., last week, Andy Amster, director of integrated analytics for Kaiser Permanente, spoke about a data dashboard developed to gather and present healthcare information in order to improve targeted outcomes. See ModernHealthcare.com for details (registration may be required).

45000 Docs Qualify for Medicaid IT Stimulus

According to a study by George Washington University School of Health and Health Services, "approximately 45,000 physicians across the nation will qualify for as much as $63,750 in Medicaid stimulus money over the next six years to install health information technology."

Intranet Usability

I attended the intranet usability seminars at the Nielsen-Norman Group's Usability Week conference in San Francisco recently.

For those unfamiliar with the discipline of "usability" -- the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal -- the Nielsen-Norman principles, Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman are among the foremost experts in designing human-friendly tools.

The seminars summarized the results of two international studies that the Nielsen-Norman Group (NNg) conducted on intranet usability. This information is particularly valuable, since intranets, unlike the Internet on the World Wide Web, are generally hidden behind protective institutional firewalls, and it is impossible to observe the best practices of others. The seminars provided detailed information about conducting usability tests for intranets as well as offering comprehensive design guidelines.

This background should prove extremely helpful as we move forward with our initiative to redesign iSITE, the CCHS intranet. Stay tuned for more news on this front!